Tanguy Ortolo

FAT

USB sticks are traditionally formatted with FAT 32, because this file system is implemented by almost every operating system and device. Unfortunately, it sucks, as it cannot use more than 2 TiB, store files larger than 2 GiB or store symbolic links for instance. In a word, it is an obsolete and deficient file system.

exFAT

Good news: someone addressed that problem. Bad new: that someone is Microsoft. So as you could expect, exFAT, the extended FAT, is a stinking proprietary, secret and patented file system. There are free implementations of that shit, but it is safer to stay away from it.

Read more Using the UDF as a successor of FAT for USB sticks

You probably know reCAPTCHA already: for the webmasters and the end user, it is an antispam system which asks you to read distorted words in order to prove that you are a human and not a spamming bot. This service has another end: instead of generating its distorted texts, it takes them from printed books to help digitalizing them.

Read more Do not reCAPTCHA!

Installing an operating system

When you want to install a new operating system, the first thing to do is to get an installer medium, which usually involves two steps: downloading an image, and writing it to a medium. There are two major types of media usable for that purpose: optical discs and USB sticks. There used to be a third one, floppy disks, but it is no longer used, and it was conceptually very similar to USB sticks.

Read more A desktop file managers failure: writing an USB stick image

Mobile devices

A number of people are using small mobile devices to read Web pages. These devices have small screens, which make it hard to read pages designed for a large screen width.

Read more Mobile browsers, you suck (or: RTFM CSS media type)

If you install Debian on a computer with an AMD graphic card (an integrated Radeon HD 6310 in my case), you will only get garbage on your screen. Even without X.Org.

This is because these graphic card require a non-free firmware to work, even in 2D with free drivers. So, boot with the kernel option radeon.modeset=0 to get a working console, then install the non-free package linux-firmware-nonfree.

After that, do not forget to complain to AMD, because that really sucks hard. At the beginning there were microwave network cards unusable without non-free firmware, then wired network cards, and they are even invading graphic cards!

Read more Debian with AMD graphic cards